Amassment started when a gamer and an anime fan came together in an attempt to unite their respective communities after realizing they had similar intentions.

Shrines, or fansites focused on information and analysis, are a rare commodity these days and have been for a while. With social networking sites like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook, and sites like Wikipedia online, many people think shrines are a thing of the past. Amassment is here to help keep shrine-making alive.

Whether you have been making shrines for years, are thinking about making your very first one, or just enjoy visiting shrines, we would love for you to be part of Amassment! We strive to be a support system for shrine makers, and aim to help, inspire, and motivate our members to make shrines, ensuring the shrine community continues to grow.

Amassment continues to grow and adapt with the shrine community. In 2008, we started with just a LiveJournal community. Although our LiveJournal community exists primarily as an archive now, we are still alive and kicking with many tools and features available to our members. Here are some of the things we offer:
 

Channels Our various branches

Forum

The majority of what we do occurs at the forum. Discuss shrines, plug your sites, take part in our challenges and activities, and even discuss your fandoms.

Twitter

The Amassment Twitter is perfect for members and lurkers to get the latest and quickest updates on what is going on at Amassment. Feel free to tweet us questions or comments, and participate in our Twitter discussions. Our events and activities also come with hashtags to faciliate community-wide conversations.

Discord Chatroom

Amassment’s community chatroom is hosted on Discord. Interact with and get to know other members, discuss shrines you are working on, and chat about your various fandoms. Conversations occur spontaneously throughout the day, so feel free to poke in and say hi.

LiveJournal

The Amassment LiveJournal is where we started. Although our forum is where most of our interaction takes place now, the LiveJournal community is still available as an archive for people who would like to check out previous discussions.

Community History A look back

Amassment was started in August of 2008 by Todd and Masao, a video game and anime fan respectively. They both loved shrines, and wanted to create a community to unite their friends who made them, as there wasn’t much interaction between the animanga and non-animanga shrining communities before then. The community was started on LiveJournal, and had about twenty members for its first month online. That number quickly grew to almost 200 LiveJournal users. Although Todd and Masao never expected Amassment to get as large as it has, Amassment has continued to expand and grow to meet the needs of its members.

One of the biggest developments at Amassment was its shrine directory that debuted in May of 2009. It tied all of Amassment’s members together by linking shrines, LiveJournals, and collectives. It has continued to be a big part of our community, and is now integrated with our domain.

Other branches were created out of need or because they were requested by members. A message board was started because members wanted a place to interact and discuss things that didn’t relate to shrines. Shrine discussion was restricted to the Amassment LiveJournal at that time, because LiveJournal was still the central base of Amassment activities. When LiveJournal began to decrease activity in 2012, Amassment.org was bought and the forums were restarted, this time promoting and encouraging shrine discussion. The forums are less restrictive than LiveJournal, and can accommodate shrine-makers who don’t have a LiveJournal, which was required to have in order to join Amassment before. Amassment was also no longer dependent on LiveJournal anymore, making the community more flexible. With these new developments, Amassment would be able to reach out to an entirely new demographic of shrine-makers.

Staff Teams were added in 2012 when Amassment grew to be too much for the Administrators to handle without help. There has never been a shortage of people willing to help out at Amassment, and that’s because Amassment has so many dedicated members. Although the Admin Team and our dedicated Forum, Events, and Directory Teams do a lot of work on Amassment behind the scenes, Amassment’s members are what make the community what it is.

Amassment owes everything to its members. Part of what makes Amassment so successful, and the go-to place for shrines is its members, who have spent their time and energy volunteering, thinking of and running events and activities, posting and participating in discussions, and offering support and feedback to each other.

Amassment has been around for a long time considering it’s a community dedicated to what most consider a dying hobby. Amassment has a long history, and because of its great members, it’s going to have a long future.